A Meditation on Unity for use at the Lord’s Supper
Robert F. Hull Jr.

EPHESIANS 4: l-16

Our Unity Is a Gift

Unity is God's gift to us. We read in Ephesians that God, in Christ, has made scattered--even alienated--people into one people: "Through [Jesus] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. We have been made fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:19-22).

We did not do anything to bring this unity about. It is a unity that cannot be engineered by a committee, negotiated by a council of representatives, hammered out in debate. It is a gift; it can only be received with gratitude. It is the work of God, accomplished by the costly act of Jesus on the cross, made present to us by the living Holy Spirit within and among us. It can only be celebrated.

And Yet, Our Unity Is also a Task

Ephesians 4:3 challenges the church to be eager to maintain the unity, to keep “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” For the gift of unity has too often been obscured by the circumstance of division. That problem dogged the church from the beginning. The scandal of division came early and stayed late. God may have made the Jews and Gentiles one, but some of them still preferred to eat at separate tables. We may read and believe that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” indeed, no Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Restorationist; but if unity is to be more than an ideal, an invisible reality, we have always to be working at it. The churches have always to be striving to be the church, semper reformanda, always reforming (not only in the 12th century, with Peter Waldo, and in the 14th with John Wyclif, not only in the 15th century with Jan Hus, and in the 16th century with Luther and Calvin, not only in the 17th century with John Bunyan, and in the 18th century with John Wesley, not only in the 19th century with the Campbells and Stone and Scott, but in the 21st century with every one of us). We must always be harking back to the sevenfold basis of unity, celebrated in Eph 4:4-6: "There is one body and one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all, and in all.''

To maintain, that is, to preserve, care for, and nurture the unity Jesus died for requires us to cultivate precisely those attitudes and virtues that seem least natural to us—humility, meekness, patience, and love. We need to come to this table often be reminded that "we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one bread."

Our Unity Is also a Goal

Unity is a hope toward which we live. It is the end for which "grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ's gift." There is a unity that can only be attained through the mutual exercise of gifts, for the building up of the body of Christ, "until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man [ανηρ] to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

There is more to that statement than the most knowledgeable interpreters have been able to unravel. I'm by no means sure of everything in the mind of the author, but at the very least he holds out the hope for his readers of a church in what we might call its "messianic fulness," made complete in the knowledge and faith that come from the Son of God. The interesting thing about this is that no one of us can attain this perfection alone: It can happen only through the mutual exercise of the gifts of ministry, and through speaking the truth in love.

In other words, we need each other. Not just each other in this room, but each other down through the centuries, the apostles and martyrs, the unsung and unknown, the saints of every language, every ethnic group, every craft and trade and profession. By God's grace, and in God's time, we may finally "have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, and to be filled with all the fulness of God” (3:18-19). May God hasten that day!